Analysis and comment from Memphis, Tennessee, on media, politics, culture, science, my life and anything else that catches my eye.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Eerily Familiar?

Does this sound familiar?

The Fords, however, hotly denied any association with [him], claiming they had never met the man who has worked as an undercover informant in the ... investigation in Nashville.

"I don't know [him]. I've never seen him and never met him," Harold Ford said in a telephone interview from Washington. "I don't know anything about him other than what I've read about him in the newspapers."

JOHN FORD SAID he also did not know [him], but described him as a "crook" who "lied to impress the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office."

Blake Wylie has done some digging and unearthed some stories from Nashville's Tennessean from 1979 and 1991 about disgraced former State Senator John Ford, his brother former US Representative Harold Ford, Sr., and nephew Harold Ford, Jr., who now holds the US House seat and is running for the US Senate.

Ford family problems have ever been with us, in the same form, over and over and over again. It's all there in Blake's post.

Not only that, he reminds of another frighteningly bizarre incident from Ford's past, one where his bluster and threats seem to have failed him:

Ford, who was married at the time, was visiting a woman in a Memphis apartment, when a man forced his way into the home, raped the woman and forced Ford and the woman to pose in the nude as he photographed them.

Ford refused to discuss the incident, even after an assailant was arrested, and the matter was seldom discussed again.